Project Week Two - July 24th & 25th

St Mary’s Primary School

Acknowledgement of Country

Our school sits beside Lake Colac at the foothills of Red Rock and on the lush green land that has been cared for by generations of the Gulidjan people from the Maar Nation. Today we recognise their long history with this beautiful land we call home. We will always remember that our community learns, grows and plays upon traditional Gulidjan land and we pay our many respects to elders past, present and emerging.

Together we touch the ground of the land (touch ground)

We reach for the sky that covers the land (raise hands)

We touch our hearts to care for the land (touch our hearts)

EXPLORATION PHASE

Monday July 25th - Project Day 3

Session 1 THEATRE GAMES - Laura

Ice breakers for connection, drama games developing performance skills (perhaps dramatic tableaux work to sound effects and archetypes work for gesture and physical posture).

Alien, Tiger and Cow Game

Playing each of these creatures, children are asked to build a "telepathic connection" between each other, and they have to freeze, commit to Laura's clap, and choose a character. You can't choose the same one - you have to be a different character each time.

The least used character has to be left out/take a seat - a game of attrition.

Strike a Pose to a Sound Effect

Laura played sound effects from the Flip speaker, and kids created Tableaux using these to inspire them.

Session 2 BIRD CREATION - Penelope

Using the birds observed during last week's sound walk:

· Swamp hen

· Black crow

· Plover

· Magpie

· Wattle bird

· Ducks

· Green and red parrot

· Swan

BIRD CREATION - Jason

Jason explained what the process was to create this type of puppet. Penelope opened a discussion about puppetry and children discussed the various forms they know (muppet-style, animatronics, large-scale parade puppets, shadow, the classic sock, and more. Penelope explained the connection between puppetry and animation, that these art forms are brother and sister. With the whole creative team's support children then each created a:

• Draft drawing of bird on A4 paper with no body part bigger than 10 cm

• Second draft, but breaking up the bird into parts to assemble a puppet with allowance for joints.

• Cut out of card bird

• Add joints

• Add collage/colours

Session 4

We had planned to do a nature treasure hunt and table top installation of places, but the bird puppet-making was more complex than anticipated, so we kept working through to complete these in the final session. We collected those that were complete, and made a bird wall.

Penelope & Jason demonstrating how to make a bird from a scribble

(for kids who were claiming that they cannot draw)

Reflection

Laura ran the reflection:

• What does the word reflection mean?

• What did you think about the day, what we have done, when you look in the mirror, what we are grateful for.

What was the broad theme:

• Puppet Making

• Birds and what we heard on the sound walk

What did you learn or enjoy about the process of making the puppets?

• Learned how to draw a duck better because I did drafts

• Drawing and making something from the drawing

• Drawing a plover and then using the puppet and making it move

• How to make a puppet out of paper

• The ups and downs of creation - my cutting skills (Raf) (laura's reflection that this is a normal part of the creative process - ups and downs / trial and error)

Tell us about the birds, and do you think they have a life behind them, have they a personality, or quirks?

My bird

• was an heir to the throne, with it's sister

• is really protective of it's eggs

• is a famous drum player

• is half human and loves pickles

• has a mouth and a beak

Tuesday July 26th, Project Day 4

Session 1 - THEATRE GAMES - Laura

These games are made to increase collaborative skills, kinesthetic connection (mind-body), and following imagination’s impulse, rather than blocking with the brain.

Pulse - Signal Game + Trains

Make a circle with your knees touching the person beside you.

Hold hands – Timing the pulse as it goes around the circle

Times:

1. 24.43 seconds

2. 21 seconds

We then upped the exercise to the game of Trains

Children Playing Trains

In Trains, in the same circle, you add a couple of stations, and also a “switch” – someone who changes direction of the train. One person in the middle observes “train spots”. This person has to find the train and then they can switch out and the game starts again.

Fortunately/Unfortunately

Storytelling circles – shifting into female/non-binary characters.

Children telling a story collaboratively.

Letter of the Alphabet

Kids responses: L – Ligament, loser, lollipops, laser, Leo, lol, locum, lung, lick, lunatic, lego etc

Now – physicalise the word with L – freeze in a pose.

Interviewing L words as statues, asking what they are.

Then repeated with the letters “J” , “M” and “S”.

Breathing exercises – leading into calmness, practice for pre-show nerve control

Tableaux from Sound

After the artists doing a demo, the kids got into groups of about 6 or 7 to devise their own Tableaux from sound, within 10 seconds.

Children's Tableaux

Why are you late? Improvisation Game

Laura prompts the style of response, and the kids ask the question in the style of:

• Devastated – thought you were dead!

• You are a teacher telling the kids off...

Office workers

Kids typing, but one of the co-workers is late, with no good reason, and the group have to come up with an excuse as to why they are late, but the person who is late doesn’t know why they are late, so co-workers have to charade the reason to the late co-worker who then has to explain why they are late to the grumpy big boss (Laura).

In the game, the person who’s late is the only one who doesn’t know the reason. Luara faces the person who is late with her back to the type-pool. They charade when her back is turned, but must type when she faces them, or they are out. Improvs included:

· There was superglue on the toilet and I got stuck

· My car got attacked by an Ostrich.

Barking Spider Creative Artists doing improv demonstrations for the kids.

Session 2 & 3 - Creation of written stories with using puppet birds as characters - Penelope

Session 2 & 3 - Creation of written stories with using puppet birds as characters - Penelope Using the bird puppets that the children created yesterday, we asked the children to use these puppet birds as the creative springboard for this next exercise. This exercise of character creation will be used for narrative writing/storyboarding, and for theatre-devising.

All Year 5s together

· One person from each table retrieved their bird from yesterday.

· Penelope facilitated a discussion in their groups of 3 or 4: What is the bird’s name, and add a short description of the bird. Using paper and pencil to record the answers they created

· Kids gave Penelope a list of things they would like to find out about each bird. Collaboratively as a group the kids invented a brand new name for the bird, where the bird lives, it’s favourite food, it’s age, it’s hobby (what it enjoys doing).

· Repeated the creation of a bird character for another, different bird.

One class at a time

Penelope facilitated a sharing circle so each student could share the characteristics they created for each bird character.

· First Bird: lives in the meatball lake, job is a woodcutter.

· Queen Duck lives in London and hobby is bossing people around.

· Swagger Mc Quacker a 16-year-old bird who eats gummy worms and loves listening to pop music and skateboarding.

· Gareth from Austria eats fried frogs, Nutella and cardboard, is 22 years old, loves reading and swimming. Their appearance is fluffy yellow feathers green hat and grey beak.

· Next Bird: 5 years, hobby is ice hockey, favourite colours are yellow and pink, eats fish seaweed and bugs.

· Plovey, lives in Ploverland, eats sunflower seeds and bread.

· Ducky, lives in a pond, hobby is dumpster diving (instead of diving into ponds).

· Rain, lives in a pine tree, eats paper, 6 years old, hobby is playing the drums, it wears beanies and an apple watch and is very flexible.

· Jeremy Sherold Cammeron, 1163 years old, hobby is wrestling, favourite foods are HUGE LIST OF THINGS including muesli bars, sushi pizza, pomegranate.

Reflecting on this creative exercise

What was easy about this exercise?

Creating a name (sometimes you can all say a word and smoosh them together),

The age was easy (lots of diversity in age),

Teacher reflection was, that listening to the responses, the foods were easy to come up with.

What was difficult about doing this?

Coming up with:

· where it lived was difficult

· a name that really suited the bird was difficult because it depends on the bird and it’s personality,

· the name was hard because everyone wanted to have an input

Challenging to come up with something different and imaginative, but a solution as to come up with a name with a first name (chosen by one child), a middle name (chosen by another child) and a last name (chosen by the last child in the group).

Each group then chose a new bird:

Penelope assured the children that ideas are plentiful – and not to be concerned with holding onto an idea as there are always many more there. She outlined the parameters of creation: Everything has to come from children’s imaginations (not TV, books, films, games tik tok etc, no fast food, no weapons).

To extend the exercise, we added appearance and physicality write ups. Here are some of the responses:

· Bird Olympics where we share all the descriptions of our birds.

· Chicken Loo, lives in the great wall of Australia, eats petrol, loves going to the servo to get an extra extra large bottle of coke. Appearance: big hat and scaly skin, and they can transform.

· Lil Bobby, age 27,000,613, eats Big Bobby’s ear wax. Appearance: fat tiny legs little arms, lives in Big Bobby’s ear, loves WWE and sky diving, hates everybody.

· Lillian Elephant, eats pizza, lives in the pizza parlour, hobbies are being alive and breathing. Personality is being weird and psycho (but what are the behaviours and attitudes of this bird?)

· Garry, 21, lives in Russia, their hobby is babysitting, they eat Garret’s toes.

· Carolyn Patricia Bob Bob, lives in a freezer, their hobby is go-carting, and her feathers are crunchy

Swap session - the other class of year 5's came in and we ran the same exercise.

Character description

· Develop a new character collaboratively – co creation

· Penelope and the class spoke to what physicality and personality traits might be, they gave lots of examples.

Sharing in the circle:

· Croca, lives in a Croc, it’s 73, hobbies are sporty (likes football, cricket and waterballet) and playing fortnight, eats crocodiles and loves crocs the shoes, it lives in Ukraine, it is brave.

· Bernie, used to live in Ted’s shed but didn’t have consent so got kicked out now lives in Ted’s paddock, non-binary, appearance is massive feet long nose and has dandruff, raw fish raw beef raw mutton and eats dandruff and blue whales out of Ted’s dam and king fish, personality is nosy, physicality is fat and can kick a football off its tail.

· Ungerra, lives in Ohio, is 777 years old, eats sugar mixed with broccoli and boogers, loves laser tag, she gets a sumo wrestler to carry her around cos she just got a pedicure.

· Miss Duckelous she is 1,275,910 years old, lives in Britain and eats bread crumb ice-cream and loves attacking people and tap dancing, her physicality is one leg no mouth and her head falls off

· Penelope, she is a woodpecker, lives in a tree and her hobbies are woodpecking, she is posh and likes to be on top of things because she’s running a nation, she eats bugs and fruit, she is brown yellow and blue, she can fly but she chooses not to because she is the queen

· Martin Marhee, determined duck, 37 years old, habitat is the coastal beach, predators are dinosaurs

· Bob it lives in war world, it eats fish and worms, likes digging trenches, it’s energetic and determined

· Coco Tea Cow, 21 years old, lives in starville, eats coco beans, can speak Italian, she is kind and caring, likes dinosaurs

· Queen Gertrude, she lives in England, eats tea bisuits and cake, age is 35, hobby is taking care of her children and feather care, physical trait yellow and pink feathers, bossy and uptight and always wears a crown.

Session 4 – Physicalising Birds via from stories – Penelope Laura

The session began with altering the way you walk, with a different body part leading the walk: knee, hand, tummy, nose etc. An exploration into character creation. The children were split into two groups and given the opportunity to observe each other in this exercise.

Reflection on exercise

· Looked quite hard from audience perspective.

· Loved walking from the nose

o Didn’t need to change natural walk that much

o Chicken nose was fun

· Audience enjoyed watching elbow leading for the chaotic energy

· The nose leading looked quite funny

Bird Story Physicalisation

Laura and Penelope chose some characteristics created by children from the earlier session for the kids to physicalise in groups. This lead to the students walking as uptight characters, and creating a single words for each of their characters. Words included:

· Disgrace

· Pitiful

· Sibling

· Revolting

· Distraught

· Dirty

Students walked and delivered their chosen word when encountering into another student. An exercise in performance skills, imagination and listening, as well as group dynamic.

Group was again split into two, and one group performed the exercise while other half observed as audience, and then they switched. Penelope ran each group through walking neutrally, slowly building to uptight characters. She then introduced whispering, working with intensity: vocal power versus volume. She called up one pair of children to perform in front of entire class to reinforced the idea of power versus volume, and introduced the idea of reaction – how do characters respond in a given situation?

After the bus kids left, Penelope took the remainder of the class back into neutral walk, and then in to a physicalisation and imagination exercise. She asked the children to close their eyes and to imagine feathers growing from each of their bellies/tummy. She then asked children to work with the following ideas/instructions:

· Keep your Fluffy tummy secret – what does this feel like? What do you observe?

Kids walk knowing they have a fluffy tummy secret - the greatest secret of all!

· When they meet someone, they say “I’m fluffy” and the other person says “Me too” – with a sense of confession.

· Exercise then repeated, but with students incredibly proud of fluffy tummy (switching their intention)

Reflection

· Kind of weird to say “I’m fluffy”, felt uncomfortable with sentence/sharing secret

· Everyone had different interpretations of sentence.

· Felt restricted when it was secret, unrestricted when proud.

Reflection (5-10 minutes)

Jason ran the reflection this afternoon and prompted the children to recall their “Moment of the Day”. Penelope probed the children for richer/deeper responses when they were “dialling in” something relatively superficial, for example if someone said “I liked story telling”, Penelope would ask “what about the story telling did you like”. Children’s responses included:

· The birds, storytelling.

· Liked the walking and intention work.

· Games at the start.

· The bird descriptions, making the names.

· Loved doing the walking, getting to say insults to people in posh voices.

Artist Reflections

Jason

Day Three: A large part of day three was spent developing articulated paper puppet birds. We went through a process of the preliminary sketch for the bird, then we discussed how the jointing procedure would work and how the preliminary sketch could be used to make the separate parts of the puppet that would be later joined with split pins. I realised this was quite a complex procedure for the grade fives in that it was not something they had done before, and they had to think more abstractly about how to pull apart their preliminary drawing and reconstitute it to make a new whole. All the children achieved this, though some were unable to fully complete their puppets. We were even able to achieve some progress on the collage effect and were able to get the children to think about block colours and mosaiced colours for their puppets.

Day Four: On day 4 most of the activities were led by Penelope and Laura. I had no making sessions so I assisted with documentation and joined in on some of the games and had fun with the children. We noted the children were quite tired by the end of the final session and it was difficult to keep their attention. I believe this is quite challenging work for some children many of them have not been exposed to this kind of learning before. I would also say that some children are quite thriving in this environment.

Laura

Days 3 and 4, wow how exciting. The process of creation is connective and playful and can also ask us to be out of our comfort zones. Over the past two days I’ve observed both students and facilitators being asked to challenge their preconceived understandings and asked to broaden their perspectives of how we will create together as a collective, our own abilities as artists (particularly when drawing) and what art/puppetry/storytelling/performance can be in its many forms. Raf’s reflection at the end of Monday really stuck with me. He spoke about the highs and lows of creation (in relation to creating a bird puppet) and I was reminded that so much of creation is just trial and error to work it out. The idea of bringing “play” and not feeling like we have to KNOW to be able to experiment into the classroom more as we continue is something I’m excited to facilitate.

Callum

This week, the children built upon the sound palate from the sound walk. From the list of birds, the kids were instructed to build a puppet of one, starting out with a draft on paper and then moving to a two dimensional card version with split pins. The students really engaged with this exercise, some creating multiple birds, and adding lots of colour and decorative trimmings. We created a wonderful bird collage on the wall, like a trippy Hitchcockian mood board.

From there, the kids were to develop characteristics and begin building stories through character building. Making multiple different iterations of the same bird, or by building characters of birds they hadn’t personally constructed, we were able to create a plethora of unique characters to play with. The kids also loved this a lot, I believe we have a fine group of storytellers in our midst.

I think the main struggle at the moment is getting creations from their own imaginations. The bird crafting lead to some wild and wonderful designs, but when storytelling became involved, lots of students defaulted to referencing characters from pre existing movies/books or fast food franchises (which may be a great way to get a KFC sponsorship, but does distract a little from the purpose of our work). I’m not entirely sure how to overcome this, as they engage with a lot of online content and this content holds a lot of social value on the playground (if you aren’t up to date with a certain YouTubers output, how can you to keep up?). But they’re starting to work more creatively and from their own imaginations, so hopefully we’re able to continue to encourage this and develop/strengthen these skills further.

Penelope

I can feel all the exercises now leading towards the next step. We are very close to development phase. We have an idea of what the area of interest is for the project, and all the work that the kids have been doing is stretching them creatively, and in an integrated manner. I really enjoy crafting these sessions with the other artists, and bringing multifaceted ways of thinking, creating and imagining into play. From the birds that the children heard on the sound walk, so many creative, explorative exercises have branched out.

I'm enjoying getting to know the children and also the dynamics in the group(s). The kids' energy started to flag on Day 4, and Lynne pointed out that this is taxing for them - there's no goofing off, no pretending to work. The kids are asked to be "on" and focused for the whole day. After lockdowns there is such a range of capacity within the kids for this. But, we are also hearing from the teachers that the sporty kids are engaging more than anticipated. Sport is a social staple and an expectation for most families in Colac. Kids and families align with certain clubs (they play in) and it's competitive and tribal. There has been in more recent years, the birth of dance schools in the area, which has fostered an interest in things other than sport (but what we are offering at the school is still way out of everyone's experience/knowledge base).

The teachers are fab. Down to earth, caring, passionate and lovely to work with. There's a genuine cohesion with artists and teachers, and it's an honour to be trusted with the kids in this way. There are some children who have taken to this project like absolute ducks to water, which is so lovely to watch certain individuals have "a moment in the sun" where normally they may not (if they are not sporty, or don't fit in for some reason). This is the beauty of the creative learning partnerships.

I'm looking forward to starting animation. It's still a couple of weeks away and we have quite a bit to do before we start, but we have bought a table for stop-motion animation and a couple of camera holders, and we are reusing ;lights from another project - getting everything set up for when we hit "go".

Great project, and none of us stop learning, in so many ways. Truly rewarding work.